Blood Ties
by AgnesDei
Summary: A suspected Jigsaw killing is not all it appears to be, and a strange puzzle box found at the scene only draws Mark Hoffman deeper into his own personal abyss. Rated M for language and disturbing content.
1. Chapter 1

"Angie..."

Hoffman curled his hand around the newspaper until his knuckles whitened and the paper creased. The ink left dark smears across the pads of his fingers but he scarcely noticed, and continued to tighten his grip until the hateful, painful facts printed on the page were almost obliterated and the bones in his hand were starting to ache. This pain nagged at him until he was forced to relax his grasp, and then he hurled the paper across the desk and snatched up the bottle that sat beside it instead, sucking down the last of the bourbon. The liquid scorched the back of his tongue and, instead of placating his hatred, simply goaded it instead. The detective growled and tossed the empty bottle aside, hearing it smash in the far corner of his office, not caring in the slightest that the floor was now sprayed with vicious shards of glass.

His eyes narrowed and stung as they strayed back to the newspaper. The headline was hidden, but he could still see the photograph on the paper, and it stared back at him. Seth Baxter. The loathsome fucking animal that had taken his little sister away from him, pinning her to the bed and taking a switchblade to her soft throat as she struggled to escape. Hoffman closed his hand once more, remembering how Angelina's skin had felt as he'd clutched at her limp, dead fingers, kissing them, feeling the last of her warmth drain away under the desperate press of his lips.

Angie's photograph stood on the shelf behind his desk, but he could feel her hazel eyes boring through the back of his neck, and he didn't dare turn to face her accusing gaze. Baxter had been walked free from prison on a technicality after just five years, and there was nothing that Hoffman could do about any of this. He'd failed to protect her, and now he'd failed to ensure justice was served for the result of an already unforgivable lapse in responsibility.

There was a knock on the office door. Hoffman jerked in his chair, straightening his back and rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand; he was sure that between his overbearing grief and the effects of the alcohol, they must be as red as a weasel's by now. He cleared his throat, stowed the newspaper out of sight beneath a stack of folders and raised his head, his lips thinning.

"Come in," he barked, more sharply than he'd intended.

The door inched open, revealing Fisk outlined in the harsh light from the corridor strips. He ran his eyes over his superior before shooting a glance at the spray of broken glass in the corner of the room, but either time was pressing or he elected to remain in tactful silence, because he simply pursed his mouth a little and then coughed nervously.

"Detective Matthews radioed in," he said, soberly. "Uniformed officers attended a possible homicide downtown. He's at the scene now."

"Jigsaw?" asked Hoffman, shoving his chair back and climbing to his feet. He stopped halfway across the office and watched Fisk; the man was suddenly looking extremely skittish in the face of this query.

"He didn't say anything about that," said Fisk, after a hesitant second or two. "Just that he wants you down there right away." He stepped closer now, handing over a slip of paper with an address scrawled upon it.

"Okay, whatever," said Hoffman, wearily, dismissing the issue with a flick of his hand and noting the address. "Tell him I'll be there in ten or fifteen."

When Fisk had left, closing the office door with an air of profound relief about him, Hoffman turned to retrieve his sidearm, hanging in its holster, and then straightened his cuffs before putting on his jacket. Only once he'd smoothed the line of his suit to his satisfaction, brushing at the smallest of creases, did he retrieve the crumpled newspaper from his hiding place under the paperwork on his desk. His chest tightened once more as his eyes tracked over the outlines and shadows of the face of the monster it depicted, and he felt his heartbeat begin to thump in his throat as his fury simmered just under his skin.

"You're not getting away, fucker," he breathed, and then turned aside and dumped the paper into the trash before leaving the room.

* * *

><p>The darkness in the cellar was perfect, almost tangible, and for a moment after he stepped through the door, Hoffman heard nothing but a small collection of sounds.<p>

At first, his footsteps on the soft clay floor masked the other noises, but as the detective paused in the doorway to locate his flashlight, they began to bleed through the resultant silence. He heard something dripping - not water, but something far more glutinous, pattering and trickling into the dust. There was an irregular hiss and thump that he eventually attributed to the ancient heating pipes on the far wall. Finally, he heard something that crept in under his skin and teased his nerves: the skeletal clatter and jingle of chains. Closing sweat-slick fingers on the butt of his flashlight at last and thumbing the switch, he raised it and played the beam around the room.

At once, he caught sight of something in the light's soft circle that had him stepping back in a blend of surprise and disgust. A severed hand depended from a rusted iron hook, swinging two and fro at the end of a chain, not two feet from his face. The hook had pierced the limb through the loose flesh between finger and thumb, puncturing the skin so cleanly that nothing but the smallest runner of blood had escaped the wound. With each swing the fingers swayed and drooped a little, as if in one last, vaguely satirical imitation of life.

"Who turned the fucking lights out?" said a hoarse voice from behind his shoulder. Eric Matthews stumbled down the creaking wooden steps and slapped at the switches on the wall. For a few seconds the fluorescents failed to respond, and then, grudgingly, they snapped into life one after the other, washing the scene with bright but anaemic blue light.

"Oh Christ," muttered Hoffman, his lip curling as he moved back further still, his head turning stiffly as he tried to take in the scene before him.

There were so many more chains – and so many more hooks, each with its own parcel of fresh meat – that he soon lost count. Most were not even recognisable parts, but mere ragged snags and tatters of skin and muscle, painted with blood. Here and there, though, he could see something telling: a lip, a finger, a foot. He glanced from one dripping horror to the next with his eyes dulling and his lungs cramped, so absorbed in this that at first, he didn't hear his partner call for the crime scene investigators. Only when Matthews stashed the radio once more and hung his head, issuing a sharp, snorting breath through his nose, did Hoffman tear his rooted gaze from the gruesome tableau that filled the cellar.

"What?" he said, vaguely, half-turning, aware that his partner had spoken.

"I said, do you think it's Jigsaw?" asked Matthews, and his voice was still both rough and flat. He moved out of Hoffman's shadow now and dodged between two of the swaying chains, careful to avoid the blood trickling from them. He pulled a pair of gloves from his hip pocket and snapped them on before reaching out to examine a dangling scrap of flesh, chosen seemingly at random.

"Who else would it be?" asked Hoffman, gruffly. There was a pinpoint headache forming behind his left eye, and it nagged at him and shortened his already strained temper.

"Dunno," said Matthews, with a tiny shrug. "But this isn't exactly Jigsaw's M.O., is it? No audio tape, no videotape, and no mechanism at all." He caught Hoffman's eye and then raised his face to the ceiling. "If the victim was ripped apart by these chains, I'd like to know how it was done, 'cause there's nothing up there except more hooks."

Hoffman glanced up, and sure enough, the chains were suspended from the ceiling by nothing more than smaller hooks, mostly caught over the beams, but some had been driven into the rough wood itself where the perpetrator hadn't found better purchase. He stepped forward, still tracking his eyes across the ceiling, and moved to join his partner in the midst of that sea of whispering chains.

"What do we know about the deceased?" he asked, absently, still studying the scene through a puzzled frown. When he received no immediate response, he craned his neck and found Matthews staring at a chain just a few inches from his face. It turned gently, and Hoffman saw with renewed revulsion that there was a single blue eyeball neatly skewered upon the dependent hook. Conquering his reaction with some difficulty, he snapped his fingers at his partner.

"Eric," he growled, "get a fucking grip, it's just another crime scene. What do we know?"

Matthews finally took a step back and refocused on Hoffman, and then cleared his throat slightly. "Not much," he said, eventually. "Uniform didn't report finding any ID in the vicinity and there's little we can tell from the, uh," he hesitated, indicating the bloodied fragments with a wave of his hand, "from the body. Male, Caucasian, maybe mid thirties, but don't quote me on anything but gender, and that's only because we found –"

"Yeah, I get the picture," said Hoffman, curtly, cutting across the other detective and turning away again. Now he'd managed to force his attention away from the human detritus, he saw that the floor was littered with the stubs of burnt-out candles, and – he dropped his gaze now, his frown deepening – what looked like symbols scrawled in dried blood just inside the borders of a large square scratched into the packed earth of the cellar floor. He elected to ignore this oddity for the moment, though, and jerked his head back up.

"Where's the guy's clothes?" he asked. Matthews's expression furrowed for a second before understanding dawned, and he turned for a second and nodded at the far corner of the room. "There's some clothing folded up over there," he explained, "but it might not be his."

Hoffman pressed his fingers to his temple for a second; the headache was back, gnawing at the lining of his skull like a rat trapped in a box. "Let's not make this any more complicated than we have to, okay?" he said, bluntly. "Sounds like CSI's arrived, anyway," he added, cocking an ear at the stairs, "so if I were you I'd go tell them they're gonna need plenty of baggies for this one."

When Matthews had creaked his way back up the distressed steps to the light above, Hoffman spun on his heel and inspected the scrawls on the floor once more. There was no doubt that they had been drawn by hand, and quite deliberately so: the lines were fine to the point that they might as well have been written with a quill pen. They formed the inner border to a crude line drawn in the floor, that line marking out a square some five feet wide. Curiously, and in spite of the fact that there was a welter of tarry, congealing blood from the victim drenching the floor all the way to the walls, the interior of the square was innocent of stains.

Hoffman shifted his weight and made to cross the square, wanting to examine the far side of the scrawl, when his foot fetched up against something on the cold floor that moved slightly. He stepped back half a pace and crouched down, reaching out and closing his gloved fingers on a small box. He stood up again and brought his hand into the glare of the fluorescent tubes, turning the object to and fro as spears of light glanced and fled from the delicately etched brass panels laid into its sides.

The puzzle box was no more than three inches on a side, but as Hoffman weighed it thoughtfully, it felt heavier than it ought to, as if it contained something far more than the sum of whatever mechanism lay beneath its faces. He angled his wrist again, and this time the reflected light flashed across his face, running through his eyes like a scalpel, and he –

(_...angie...god no...she was my family my only family my...NO!..._)

The taste of blood brought him back to his senses, but it took him a few seconds to understand that he'd bitten into his tongue to stifle a shriek, and it was only with this realisation that the pain filtered through as well, raising a low groan from the pit of his breathless chest. He blinked, clearing his vision, and looked more closely at the box. It nestled in his palm now, as quiet and as still as death, and though he turned it back and forth, he could not reproduce what had just taken place. It wasn't until he lowered his hand again that he felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickling painfully...and realised that the subtle rattle of the chains all around him had stilled at once.

This fresh silence was broken by the low mutter of voices and squeal of feet on the wooden steps; Matthews was returning with the crime scene officers. Hoffman's hand clenched involuntarily, closing on the box so tightly that he felt his nails tear through the latex of his glove, bringing the pads of his fingers into contact with the thing at last. Whatever comprised it, simple mahogany and bright brass panels, was colder than blue ice beneath his touch, and he gasped as this fierce sensation ran up his arm and into his heart like a rapier. He felt his muscles move of their own volition, and slipped the box into his pocket.

"What's the story down here?" called Matthews, descending the steps once more. His voice was now muffled by a paper mask, and it wasn't until then that Hoffman realised that there was in fact a deep, musky and very distressing odour about the cellar. The detective was leading a small deputation of CSI officers in white coveralls and goggles, and once they reached the bottom of the steps, they fanned out with practised ease. One unpacked a camera and began to photograph the scene; Hoffman turned his eyes away from the strident snap of the flashbulb and took his partner aside to the foot of the steps.

"This isn't a Jigsaw scene," he murmured, keeping his voice as low as he could. Matthews's eyes creased momentarily above the mask, which he then tugged aside the better to respond.

"I told you that from the start," he retorted. "I don't think the chief's going to agree, though, so until he says otherwise, that's how we're gonna have to treat it."

"This is _my_ investigation," said Hoffman, his voice still soft but now laced with determination.

"Not if he takes you off it, it isn't. Now wise up and do this by the book." Matthews gave him a once-over glance. "What's gotten into you lately?"

Hoffman nursed his still-bleeding tongue in silence for a moment, debating his response. The two of them had not been partners at the time of Angelina's murder; Hoffman was fresh out of uniform at the time and still ranked some way below Matthews in spite of his greater age. Only the other detective's disciplinary demotion four years ago had brought them together as equals and, finally, partners. In truth, he had no idea if Matthews even knew the details of the case, since it had not occurred in their jurisdiction. If not, it would serve no purpose to tell him, and certainly not here, in the midst of more death. He leaned his shoulder against the wall, and this jarred him with the incriminating weight of the strange box, secreted in the pocket of his coat.

"Nothing," he said at last, meeting Matthews's eyes by force of will and setting his jaw.

"You sure about that?"

"I'm sure," snapped Hoffman, and then brushed past his partner without a further word or glance and climbed the steps, slitting his eyes against the dazzling sunlight.

He felt his hand stray to his pocket as he drew a breath of much-needed fresh air, and then ran his fingers over the lines and angles of the concealed object. Somehow, in spite of the warmth in which it had been nestled, snug against his side, the box was now even colder.


	2. Chapter 2

The evening had reached its nadir in the midst of a miserable slew of rain showers, and Hoffman had not stirred from the couch in more than two hours.

The puzzle box sat on the coffee table in front of him at an angle, catching the low light from the lamp in the corner, which illuminated just one face while leaving the other steeped in a near perfect quadrangle of shadow. It had been some time since he'd noticed that the thing cast no reflection whatsoever in the polished surface of the table, and it was this that had so far kept him from touching it again. Instead he sat with his thumbnail pinched between his teeth and studied it in complete silence.

Hoffman was still at a loss to explain to himself why he'd concealed evidence from a murder scene, but at the same time he had been unable to wipe the memory of that brutal flashback from his mind; an empty bottle at the far end of the couch bore witness to his attempts on this score, but he was not drunk, nor even close to it, and the images continued to dance, bone-white and naked, behind his eyes.

(_...fucking reporters at her funeral don't they have anything better to do..._)

(_...son of a bitch isn't gonna walk if I have anything to do with it..._)

(_...I'll kill you you piece of shit I will end your fucking LIFE..._)

Rigg had been there, he recalled, and had physically restrained him from further action, no mean feat when Hoffman had been fighting like a maddened bear to reach his intended prey from all the way across the courtroom. Whatever had brought these remembrances back to such gruesome prominence had something to do with the box, he was sure of it. The images had been forced upon him by the thing with such insistent clarity that he felt as if he were being reminded of them for a very specific reason. Quite without willing himself to do so, he sat forward and picked it up as his eyes glazed over a little.

The rain continued to beat against the window of his apartment as he ran cool fingertips over the surface of the box. Whoever had made it had certainly been an artist of some proficiency; the joints between the panels were invisible to all but the closest scrutiny. As he passed the barest touch over the top, however, he found his thumb resting on what felt like a button in the centre of the panel, standing ever so slightly proud of the surrounding brass fretwork. Tilting his head an inch to the side, he pressed down on it.

The box slid apart with no friction and only the subtlest scratch of gears, and though he had been expecting some reaction, Hoffman jerked and almost dropped it. Instead, he set it down again on the table in front of him, moving quickly, his hands shaking a little as the box completed its movement and then stopped with a soft click. He sucked in a sharp, ragged breath and watched it owlishly, but there were no further signs of activity. In some way, nevertheless – and Hoffman found himself disturbed at this thought – the thing seemed to be radiating potential.

He narrowed his gaze at it, bit his lip fractionally and then stretched out his hand once more, fingers extended, approaching the box as if it might rear up like a snake and strike at him.

Nothing. He ran his hand over it, examining the dull surface of unpolished wood that had been exposed by the movement of the mechanism, and finding it, just here, flawed and almost prosaic. There was even the slightest warp in the grain of the mahogany where the artisan's tools had been unable to reduce the surface to a perfect plane, and he circled this with his fingertip for a heartbeat before withdrawing once more and sitting back with an absorbed half-smile playing about his mouth, a smile that was part bewilderment and part embarrassment at his own apprehension.

"Just a fucking puzzle box," he said, and then paused. There had been something else, some soft harmonic to his voice as he spoke, a shadow of a breath behind those five words; and in contrast to his own rough tones, that dim echo upon the edge of hearing had been as smooth as satin. It had him turning over his shoulder for a second, but the apartment was empty and quite innocent of sound but for the mindless beat of the clock above the fireplace.

Now feeling even more ashamed of himself for jumping at spooks and shades, Hoffman turned back to see the box deliberately and quietly realigning itself. The section that had extruded itself was sliding back into place, the hidden machinery whispering and the tiny gears moving tooth by tooth until the fault line had been restored and all was, once more, whole.

The outgoing breath snagged in his throat, and when it emerged, it was as a hoarse, self-conscious laugh. This sound wrenched Hoffman out of his fugue, and he ran his palms down his face, sighing roughly, before climbing to his feet. He staggered a little as he did so – the effects of the whisky seemed to be coming into play at last – but then righted himself and headed for the door, shaking his head at his own folly.

It wasn't until he was halfway through the door, drawing up the hood of his coat, that he turned back and subjected the box to one last, calculated stare from across the room. It lay just where he'd left it, set at an angle on the glowing surface of the coffee table, and seemed somehow to reduce everything else in the apartment to background inconsequentia. The light in the room was warm and soft, but seemed to lose all its colour and spirit against the faces of the box itself.

_Ridiculous_. He shook his head again and turned away, finished closing the front door, double-locked it behind him and headed for the elevator at the far end of the passage.

Perhaps two minutes passed in stifling silence, but then the box moved once more. A second movement in its heart disturbed its equilibrium, suddenly and violently, and the thing teetered onto an edge before landing on a different face entirely. Several sharp cracks opened across the top and along its flanks, exposing yet more untouched black wood, and this section made one simple turn about its axis before sliding back into line.

The lights in the apartment dimmed, struggled, brightened once more and then faded as searing white sparks crawled from the box, drawing lines of freezing cold fire in their wake.

* * *

><p>Hoffman's cell beeped just as he pushed through the door of the bar, but he fished it out of his pocket and turned it off without checking who'd sent the text. Probably Matthews anyway, he reasoned; he was not in regular contact with anyone else these days. If it was Matthews then it was police business, and Hoffman had no intention of letting work intrude on his new plan of getting so drunk that he couldn't see straight.<p>

He hadn't been to the bar in several weeks, and this was not only because the manager had made veiled threats about a ban after Hoffman's last marathon drinking session in there. There was also the matter of residual shame over his burgeoning alcoholism – the detective wasn't that deep in self-denial that he refused to take ownership of the technical term for his habits of late – and there was another reason, a reason that he was currently struggling to recall as he propped his elbows on the bar and dropped his chin into one hand.

"What do _you_ want?"

This smooth yet scathing tone cut through his reverie, and at the same time, provided a reminder of that last, formerly elusive reason. He dragged his gaze up and flinched briefly beneath the weight of a green-eyed, piercing glare.

"Scotch, please," he said, somewhat lamely, although he felt that any attempt he might make to apologise to Samantha for his past behaviour would only provoke her. In truth, he remembered well enough, he'd just been trying to avoid the memory. Last time he'd been here, she'd taken him home at the end of her shift and he'd made a valiant effort at trying to fuck her, to which she'd responded until it became clear that he was far too inebriated to rise to the challenge – at which point she had kicked him onto her couch with an aggrieved snort and then slammed the bedroom door behind her.

To her credit, Samantha returned with Hoffman's drink without comment, but merely smacked it down in front of him before retiring to the far end of the bar and forcing preoccupation on herself with a visible effort of will. It was late on a weekday evening and the place was virtually deserted, but it was apparent that she would rather walk over red hot iron nails than engage him in conversation any further. He shrugged, and closed his hand around the glass.

There was a whisper of chiffon beside him, and then a subtle creak as someone took the next bar-stool. Hoffman did not turn at once, but before he did, he caught a beguiling scent at the far edge of perception. Not perfume; it was both sweeter and subtler than any man-made fragrance, more like a distant field of flowers in early summer. He was still fighting to identify it as he lowered his glass once more and then redirected his attention, turning to his right.

The woman beside him was undeniably beautiful, but in a way that – somehow – didn't quite fit, almost as if she'd stepped out of another time, be it the past or the future. Her eyes were slanted, wide-set, and so dark that he found himself on the brink of losing his focus in them entirely. Those eyes were sheltered behind a soft fall of shining black hair, but her gaze was no less penetrating for this. Her lips were as scarlet as sin and she was dressed to match. Hoffman kept on staring in silence until she smiled slightly and leaned in a little to speak into his ear.

"You've been alone too long," she said, in the tiniest of accents, which Hoffman thought might be French, though he was mostly too busy wondering at this odd introduction. Before he could speak up himself, however, she'd sat back and, all seriousness now, offered him a slender white hand.

"Angelique," she said, and then said no more.

"Uh, listen..." he began, and then trailed off. Angelique was watching him with the smallest curve to her mouth, and it had drained his sense of propriety, such as it was. She was clearly hitting on him, and considering the way he must look, with both exhaustion and alcohol conspiring to line his eyes in pink and what felt like half the filth of the city under his skin, that was in itself a significant curiosity. He wondered if perhaps she was a hooker, but –

"I'm not selling _anything_, Detective," she purred, and now that knowing smile broadened a notch. Hoffman winced – had she read his mind?

"I didn't say you were," he said, and averted his gaze briefly. As soon as he had done so, however, he felt her fingers on his cheek, and Angelique turned his head back to her once more. Her touch was warm, and her nails scratched slightly but insistently at the soft skin below his eye, jarring his nerve endings as they did so. He reacted to this, reaching up to take her wrist and turn her hand aside.

"Forgive me," she said, withdrawing, although there was nothing but a token apology about her manner. "To touch another soul...it's been too long. Haven't you felt that, too?"

"How long?" he asked, or thought he did.

"Centuries..." she whispered, and now her long fingers were laced with his own and her nails were digging into the back of his hand, and this time, he didn't stop her.

Every single instinct in Hoffman's brain was screeching like a murder of crows, telling him to loose himself from that grip, get up, turn and leave at once. The woman in front of him was obviously either drunk, high or insane, any one of which was bad news, and yet he remained, mostly because there was nothing about her manner that suggested she was anything but rational to the bone. His eyes strayed from her own, tracing the line of her lips, the shadows beneath her chin and collarbones, and lingered on her cleavage.

The tight bodice of her dress pinned her breasts tight against her but failed to restrain them altogether, and over the edge of the crimson brocade and gold braid trim he could just about see the upper curves of her areolae, which were startlingly pink set against the smooth white flesh of her breasts. Hoffman drew a very deep, quiet breath and, with that, felt a telling twitch in his groin and shifted awkwardly on his seat.

"Don't fight it," Angelique was saying, from so very far away. He dragged his head up with great difficulty and focused on her eyes once more. They were solemn now, and much wider than before, and where she'd seemed opaque before, now he could feel the hunger radiating from her. Not just hunger for sex, he knew, but for his heart and soul, too.

"I don't think I can do this," he said, absently, still lost in that fixed stare.

"What frightens you so?" she asked him. Her grasp tightened to the point of pain, and he felt the skin on his knuckles break and bleed as she drove her nails into him. Still, he ignored it.

"I'm not afraid."

"Then speak your mind," she said, softly. "I can give you everything you've ever wanted. Don't think I can't see it all written in your eyes. You despise this world and you wish it was dead, but there are worse things than death, Detective, believe me. Flesh is the only thing that makes it worth enduring, and it's the only thing you truly desire. Flesh to be bound, and broken, and bled, just as you're bleeding now..."

She released his hand and sat back, then raised her fingers to her mouth and sucked his blood from them. "I see everything," she told him, "and I can show it all to you, if you wish." Still holding his gaze, Angelique slipped from her seat and stood, and before he could say anything more, she'd turned and left the bar, leaving the door to creak shut behind her.

Hoffman realised that his mouth was hanging open, and promptly closed it, and as he did so he tasted blood in his own mouth, too.

* * *

><p>"<em>Princess...<em>"

Angelique heard that voice in her blood and her bones rather than in her ears, and she knew that she had no power to disobey the summons it contained. Clenching her fists in apprehension, she stepped into the foul gloom of the alley behind the bar to meet her maker.

"My Lord," she said, though she kept her chin raised, this being the smallest gesture of defiance she felt able to muster. He did not keep her in waiting, as was his habit at times, but melted out of the shadows at her side and stood over her with his head on one side.

"I did not request your attendance, Princess," he said, and though his voice was as hollow as ever, she heard a clear strand of chastisement in it.

"I go where my Lord goes," she said, without looking around.

"Oh?" he said, archly. "And did I also encourage your attempt to seduce my penitent? I don't think so. You display a regrettable appetite for the pleasures of the flesh, Princess, which puzzles me all the more for one who seems unaware of the many other purposes to which it can be put. I trust you have not forgotten that what form you claim is at my disposal?"

"I am not ungrateful to you, or to Leviathan," she said, and now she watched as he moved around her shoulder and into her sight. The moon had found a break in the clouds and now it cast a chilled glow over his face, darting from the myriad polished pins piercing his cheeks and scalp and silvering those empty black eyes for a moment.

"Come now. Gratitude does not become you, and neither does sincerity," he said, scornfully. "I watch you all the time, Princess; what could have had you believe I did not? You cannot be trusted."

"I don't ask for your trust," she snapped, determined to assert herself in however small a manner. "Only for the scraps from your table."

"This one is _mine_," he said, warning her.

"May we not both take our pleasure from him?"

He reached out now, closing dry, freezing fingers on Angelique's chin and leaning in close to her, so close that his shadow crossed her eyes and left her shivering in its depths.

"Very well," he said, after several seconds of this study. "But hear me now: stand in my way, challenge my claim on Mark Hoffman in the slightest and I will deprive you of form once more, and this time I'll cast you into the Schism for good measure, where you will find out that even the soulless can burn in agony. Do you understand me, child?"

"Yes," she said, and pulled herself free of both his hand and his gaze. "I understand."


End file.
